Shortstories

Cyborg City

I was feeling sorry for myself because the sad thing was happening. I was feeling sad for myself because the sorry thing was happening. I was feeling so sad because of the bad thing that kept on happening. The bad thing and the sad thing. Why did God create me I wondered? Is it just so he can make fun of me? Was I created simply to suffer? I often think this – it’s sometimes the only way I have of making sense of my situation. At least if I can make sense of things then it doesn’t feel so bad. That’s a basic human characteristic, isn’t it? The need to understand, the need to make sense of what’s happening. No matter how senseless it may seem, we have to try to make sense of it. We have to create a narrative about it, no matter how terrible that narrative might be…

I was feeling sad for myself because the bad thing had happened – the bad thing that I don’t like had happened. The bad thing that I don’t like always happens. It never doesn’t happen. It happens all the time and it never stops. It happens over and over again forever and that’s why I was feeling sorry for myself. The bad thing is called ‘life’.

Audaciously, without thinking about what I was doing, I took a big greedy bite out of the Hero Sandwich. This was a mistake. The sandwich was far too rich for my blood – the heady intoxicants it contained were too potent for my weakened constitution and I started to hallucinate feverishly. I was in a place I did not recognize, a place I had never been in before. I was standing on a flat and endless plain and the distant horizons were dotted with spires and turrets. They were not spires and turrets of an archaic kind however – these were of a strange and futuristic design. Clearly they belonged to some fantastical science-fiction future-world. It wasn’t a scene from mankind’s terrible past that I was witnessing but rather a scene from mankind’s even more terrible future. The air was as hot as if it had come out of an oven and it smelled of metal. Cyborgs with the faces of laughing dogs were walking by me on both sides. They paid me no heed and I wandered if I was invisible. I felt as if I was in a dream. I felt dizzy. I felt as if I were choking. I felt like being sick. I didn’t know whether what I was seeing – this strange futuristic world – was real or not. One of the dog-faced Cyborgs walking by stopped right next to me, turned, and looked straight into my face. ‘This world is real my friend,’ it told me telepathically, it’s laughing face momentarily sad as it gazed upon me, ‘so you had better get used to it…’

The air was baking hot and it smelled of metal. It smelled burnt. The sun was directly above me – the heat coming down from it was impossible. The sun must be going supernova I thought stupidly, but I knew that it wasn’t. It was just another day. Another day in the far-distant future. Everything around me was on such a vast scale that I felt dwarfed. I felt hugely insignificant. On either side of me the Cyborgs were walking this way and that, taking no notice of me as they passed. I had made a big mistake when I put the Hero Coat on, I realized. My legs – not being able to bear the weight of this mighty coat – had gone from under me and I had immediately been flung into the far-distant future. A very strange and terrible future too, by the look of it…